Congressional Power - The vietnam war

The Americanization of the Vietnam War thus arrived at a time when
Congress as an institution was looking for new avenues to shape U.S.
foreign policy. Until 1964, Congress had played a fairly minor role on
Southeast Asian matters. In 1954, Eisenhower had invited legislative
leaders to comment on whether the United States should use its military to
rescue beleaguered French forces at Dien Bien Phu. But the president had
little desire to send troops and almost certainly engaged in the charade
so he would have an excuse to explain his lack of action to the French.
The Kennedy years featured a more consistent level of congressional
comment. Many of the same critics of foreign aid—Gruening, Gore,
Church—also questioned the military and economic assistance program
toward the dictatorial government of Ngo Dinh Diem and called for Congress
to more aggressively counter administration policy. But at no point did a
sustained legislative effort on Vietnam policy emerge.

That condition changed after Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency in
November 1963 and military conditions in Vietnam began to deteriorate.
With only one exception, Johnson accomplished his goal of keeping public
attention off Vietnam until after the 1964 elections. But that exception
resulted in one of the most famous pieces of legislation in the postwar
Congress. In August 1964, after North Vietnamese vessels reportedly
attacked U.S. forces in the Tonkin Gulf, the administration introduced a
resolution granting the president authority to take all necessary measures
to repel the attack. The open-ended wording disturbed some senators, but
the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright,
assured his colleagues that Johnson would never utilize the full breadth
of the authority the Tonkin Gulf Resolution granted him. Although in
retrospect Fulbright's words ring hollow, at the time his
assertions seemed perfectly reasonable. Eisenhower and Kennedy had
introduced similar offerings to deal with specific crises, and these had
not resulted in a massive commitment of U.S. troops overseas.

By mid-1965, however, the increasing numbers of U.S. troops in Vietnam
prompted a more active congressional response. For the rest of
Johnson's term and most of Richard Nixon's, an increasingly
powerful group of Senate liberals tried to end the war through
congressional action. Perhaps their most important initiative came in
1966, when Fulbright convened public hearings on Vietnam policy that
attracted a national television audience to witness divisions among the
foreign policy elite regarding the administration's approach to
matters in Southeast Asia. Indeed, although members of Congress failed to
prevent the Americanization of the Vietnam conflict, their activities did
help turn U.S. opinion against the war. In the process, Fulbright became
the most powerful Foreign Relations Committee chair—and, perhaps,
the most important congressional player on foreign policy
matters—since William Borah in the 1920s.

Beyond the antiwar activities of Senate liberals were two other
substantial areas of congressional involvement in 1960s foreign policy.
The first centered on the wartime actions of congressional Republicans and
prowar Democrats, such as Senators John Stennis (Democrat) and John Tower
(Republican) and Representative Gerald Ford (Republican). Stennis and
Tower were particularly significant because their extensive contacts made
them the Capitol Hill voices for the military at a time when the Pentagon
was often articulating its own perspective on international affairs.
Second, quite apart from Vietnam, Senate liberals challenged Cold War
principles elsewhere in the world. Because their dissent did not fully
blossom until the United States already had tens of thousands of troops on
the ground in Vietnam, Senate liberals always acted under some constraint.
The full force of their perspective emerged only in their positions on
newer issues—such as Greece, where they demanded a cutoff of U.S.
aid after the military coup of 1967, and Thailand, where their
anti-interventionism offered a clear sense of their desired role for the
United States in Southeast Asia.